Penny Summerfield

Biographic Data

ID283221
NAMEPenny Summerfield
GIVEN NAMESPenny
FAMILY NAMESummerfield
SIGNATURESUMMERFIELD P
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Manchester
ORCID0000-0001-7288-3867
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS53
TOTAL CITATIONS102
AUTHOR COUNT53
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1977
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2023
H-INDEX6

  • My Heart Is a Piece of Stone”: Anxious Separations and Emotional Dislocations in British Correspondence from the Long Second World War

    Open AccessPenny SummerfieldARTICLEJournal of British Studies2023Cited by: 1References: 1

    Historians who write about emotion in wartime focus mainly on the experiences of front-line soldiers and of civilians under bombardment exposed to life-threatening events. However, in Britain in World War II, conscription, mobilization, and evacuation inflicted hugely disruptive separations on a large proportion of the population, and the emotions that they provoked have been under-examined. This paper excavates emotion in an unusually complete s…

  • Helen McCarthy, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood in Modern Britain

    Open AccessPenny SummerfieldARTICLESociety2022

  • We Cows are in a Very Serious Predicament’: Constructions of Land Girls and Cattle in Britain in the Second World War

    Open AccessThomas Webb, Penny Summerfield et al.ARTICLEGender & History2021

    This article addresses understandings of a novel wartime labour force, the Women's Land Army, and of the cattle that a large proportion of its members worked with, in Britain during and after the Second World War. It draws on official records, publicity material, print media, memoirs and oral histories for an analysis of the gendered dynamics of the wartime management of the dairy herd, focusing on cultural constructions and their contradictions.…

  • MacDougall, Voices of Scotswomen in Peace and War: Spoken recollections of Home Life, Employment and 1939–45 War Service

    Open AccessPenny SummerfieldARTICLEScottish historical review/ The…2021

  • Brothers in the Great War: Siblings, masculinity and emotions

    Open AccessLinda Maynard, Penny SummerfieldBOOKBrothers in the Great War2021Cited by: 1References: 15

    Drawing on a broad range of personal accounts, this is the first detailed study of siblinghood in wartime. The relative youth of the fighting men of the Great War intensified the emotional salience of sibling relationships. Long separations, trauma and bereavement tested sibling ties forged through shared childhoods, family practices, commitments and interests. We must not equate the absence of a verbal language of love with an absence of profoun…

  • Remembering Shani D'Cruze (1954-2021)

    Penny Summerfield, Kim Stevenson et al.ARTICLEWomen s History Review2021

    This obituary is written by some of the many friends and colleagues who knew and appreciated Shani D’Cruze during her lifetime .It is with great sadness that we learned of the death of Dr Shani D’C

  • Women of war: Gender, modernity and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry

    Juliette Pattinson, Penny SummerfieldBOOKWomen of War2020

  • More-Than-Human Emotional Communities: British Soldiers and Mules in Second World War Burma

    Thomas Webb, Thomas A Webb et al.ARTICLECultural and Social History2020Cited by: 1References: 11

    This article offers a perspective on the overlooked ‘more-than-human’ emotional dimensions of the British war effort of 1939 to 1945. We focus on the relationships between British soldiers and their mules in Burma. We argue that the British soldiers who were required to become muleteers, together with their officers and veterinary personnel, formed an ‘emotional community’ (Rosenwein), based on a shared idea of a close and mutually beneficial rel…

  • Alternative histories of the self: A cultural history of sexuality and secrets, 1762–1917

    Penny SummerfieldARTICLEWomen s History Review2019

    This is a book for anyone who wonders how, historically, individuals have dared to be different. It is not a book about the definition by experts of categories of difference, such as transvestite o

  • Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice

    Penny SummerfieldBOOKHistories of the Self2018

    Histories of the Self interrogates historians’ work with personal narratives. It introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past. Historians are interested as never before in how people thought and felt about their lives. This turn to the personal has focused attention on the capacity of subjective records to illuminate both indiv…

  • Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice

    Penny SummerfieldBOOKHistories of the Self2018

    Histories of the Self introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past. Supported by case studies, it is essential reading for students and researchers interested in how personal testimony has been and can be used by historians

  • Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II eds. by Marlene Kadar and Jeanne Perreault

    Penny SummerfieldARTICLEBiography2018

    Reviewed by: Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II eds. by Marlene Kadar and Jeanne Perreault Penny Summerfield (bio) Marlene Kadar and Jeanne Perreault, editors. Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015, 251 pp. ISBN 978-1771120357, $31.19. This collection of essays addresses the ways in which memory is put to work in personal narratives relating to women's experiences of World War II. Genres of narrative…

  • Infidel feminism: Secularism, religion and women's emancipation, England 1830–1914

    Laura Schwartz, Cordelia Beattie et al.BOOKInfidel Feminism2017

  • The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol. III, Total War: Economy, Society and Culture

    Penny SummerfieldARTICLEFamily & Community History2017

    This clearly written and well-presented book elaborates the harrowing complexities of the Second World War. The editors’ introduction establishes the analytical framework developed in the individua

  • French children under the Allied bombs, 1940–45: An Oral History

    Ana Carden-Coyne, Lindsey Dodd et al.BOOKFrench Children under the Allied…2016

    This book provides a unique perspective on the Allied bombing of France during the Second World War which killed around 57,000 French civilians. Using oral history as well as archival research, it provides an insight into children's wartime lives in which bombing often featured prominently, even though it has slipped out of French collective memory. The book compares three French towns with different experiences of bombing: Boulogne-Billancourt ,…

  • Housewives and citizens: Domesticity and the Women's Movement in England, 1928-64

    Caitríona Beaumont, Cordelia Beattie et al.BOOKHousewives and Citizens2016

    This book explores the contribution that five conservative, voluntary and popular women's organisations made to women's lives and to the campaign for women's rights throughout the period 1928 to 1964. The five groups included in this study are: the Mothers' Union, the Catholic Women's League, the National Council of Women, the National Federation of Women's Institutes and the National Union of Townswomen's Guilds. The book challenges existing his…

  • Women's Liberation Movement in Scotland

    Cordelia Beattie, Lynn Abrams et al.BOOKWomen's Liberation Movement in…2016

  • Gender, rhetoric and regulation: Women's Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900-55

    Helen Glew, Penny SummerfieldBOOKGender, Rhetoric and Regulation2016

    Collectively, the Civil Service and the London County Council (LCC) employed tens of thousands of women in Britain in the early twentieth century. As public employers, these institutions remained influential for each other and for private employers more widely as a benchmark for the conditions of women's white-collar work. This book examines three key aspects of women's public service employment: inequality of pay, the marriage bar and inequality…

  • Modern women on trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper

    Lucy Bland, Cordelia Beattie et al.BOOKModern Women on Trial2016

    Focusing on a number of sensational trials with young female defendants involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion in the period 1918-1924, the books suggests that the figure of the modern woman/flapper was a personification of the upheavals of the time, representing anxieties about modernity, and instabilities of gender, class, race and national identity. Later she came to stand for the ‘roaring’ 1920s, but in the per…

  • Divided We Stand

    Penny SummerfieldARTICLEHistory Workshop Journal2014

    were the rhetorical high point of Churchill’s first speech in the Commons as Prime Minister: ‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: ‘‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’ ’ ’.1 It was a phrase that encapsulated the all-in-it-together spirit of sacrifice and hard work with which Churchill endeavoured to imbue the ‘war effort’. Churchill meant it to apply to the population as a whole. Geo…

  • Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict

    Penny SummerfieldBOOKWomen Workers in the Second World…2013

    The Second World War is often seen as a period of emancipation, because of the influx of women into paid work, and because the state took steps to relieve women of domestic work. This study challenges such a picture. The state approached the removal of women from the domestic sphere with extreme caution, in spite of the desperate need for women’s labour in war work. Women’s own preferences were frequently neglected or distorted in the search for …

  • Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the making of the modern self James Hinton

    Penny SummerfieldARTICLEWomen s History Review2013

    Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the making of the modern self JAMES HINTON Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 Pp. xii + 258. £25 (hbk). ISBN 978 0 19 957466 7 At the start of the Second

  • Concluding Thoughts: Performance, the Self, and Women's History

    Penny SummerfieldARTICLEWomen s History Review2013Cited by: 2

    These concluding reflections on the special edition ‘Performing the Self: Women's Lives in Historical Perspective’ highlight the significance for women's history of concepts such as audience, persona, composure and biography, review different theories concerning peformativity and subjectivity, and demonstrate how the articles in this edition are contributing to debates in this area

  • Churchill's Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain . By John Welshman

    Penny SummerfieldARTICLECultural and Social History2012

  • War and welfare: British prisoner of war families, 1939-45 - By Barbara Hately-Broad

    Open AccessPenny SummerfieldARTICLEThe Economic History Review2011